AFTERTHOUGHT
Onion towers
JOHN WELLS
Brighton—Mingling this week with the shabbily-dressed Sussex peasants and small businessmen who take the two weeks' official holiday permitted them by the state in this faded and windswept resort by the grey Atlantic, writes Boris Psmith, the distinguished Soviet Commentator on British Affairs, I found it hard to believe that beneath the oriental domes and grim minarets of the gaunt Roylpavlyon, where once the jaded Prinsregnet indulged his repulsive whims, the hard core of orthodox Liberals were sitting in plenary conclave. Indeed, to the casual observer of the British scene, the fact that card-carrying Liberals exist at all in 1969 must seem hardly credible. Everything seems on the surface so repressive.
Governed by a one-party people's dictatorship that is very closely modelled on Soviet lines, in spite of the nominal 'Queenie' and `Opposed Party', preserved out of deference to the British bourgeoisie's love of tradition, and drugged with a diet of compulsory pornography, state-approved trivialities and propaganda of varying sophistication, the British people have made laudable strides during the last few years towards the achievement of those stan- dards of freedom enjoyed by their comrades in Eastern Europe. How then is it that the foul spectre of liberalisation, exorcised afresh, or so it seemed, by each new Wilsonist Diktat, can rise at such a time to disturb the peace of these Socialist islands?
The answer lies first, I believe, in the oature of the British people. Traditionally 4Y and crafty—it was the Russian writer E. B. Zhlotzin who first described them as Perfidious Albinoes—they possess more than their natural share of slow cunning, tempered by centuries of piracy, plunder, and petty theft. The bourgeois moral of preserving what one has appeals to them almost as much as the idea of acquiring more without effort. Both the peasantry and the bourgeoisie have viewed recent reforms with suspicion, taking advantage of them where they offered `summat for newt', or free pickings, and resisting doggedly when there was any question of increased taxes, subscriptions, or compulsory wealth-sharing. To the coal-miner of Tunbridge Wells or the peat-cutter of Devon, as to the manure operative in J. Bunion's Pilgrims of Progress, the muck of capital is more interesting than the distant vision of a Socialist paradise on earth.
Faced with such an anti-social society, the masters of the British people have resorted, perhaps inevitably, to the tradi- tional combination of Christian homily and cheapjack patter that makes up for the Englishman the language of political oratory. Operating through the state television net- works—again the existence of the so-called 'independent' channel is no more than a sop to die-hard liberals—and through the official press, the Government has tried ceaselessly during the past years to educate the workers, bourgeoisie and old landowners in the rudiments of practical socialism: again and again it has failed. True, the machinery of state socialism continues to rumble in- exorably forwards, apparently crushing all resistance, but the resistance miraculously remains. Attacks on the Government, both on Premier Wilson and Deputy Hath, con- tinue to circulate in small-circulation papers of the crudest kind; titles are still used in private; and tax evasion is said in some circles to have overtaken the football lottery as a national hobbyhorse.
For these dissidents, whose numbers may run into many millions, no leadership has so far presented itself. No leadership, it has been said by Party cynics who believe Wilson's grip on his political position to be as iron-firm as that of his hero and mentor, J. Stalin, could ever appeal to such a desperate and disparate rabble. How could any leadership, it is argued, since Feudal times in any sense lead' such a party of self-obsessed, mean, shifty brigands as the British peasantry, bourgeoisie and leisured classes? Only the totalitarian 'tolerance' of the Wilson-Hath Coalition can drive them: to offer oneself as the democratically elected servant of their polymorphic will would be to invite self-mutilation, despair. and political destruction. So at least runs the argument. It is then that the glib apologists of the Wilsonist Terror habitu- ally fall silent. For such a leadership does exist. or at least one undergoing all the symptoms they predict, and that is the leadership of the Old Liberals.
Admittedly the self-mutilation, despair. and political destruction has been going on for some years, and the great unaligned underground army of disgruntled British citizens has failed so far to rally to their wobbling banner. But the Old Liberals are patient. calculating and resourceful. Ir bringing about the resignation last year of former Party Leader Grummund, whose rugged good looks, forceful personality and oratorical dynamism may have struck some dissidents as too authoritarian, the Party may well have removed the last barrier to a general enrolment. In his place comes paunchy, bald and bespectacled Jiminy Throwupp. who combines Wilson's legen- dary showmanship with that happy freedom from political preoccupations that makes the Party as a whole so attractive to the Maoists, Trotskyites, Powellites and Glad- stonian Revisionists who now form the inner conscience of the movement.
This week, here in Brighton, Sussex, we can observe what may be the first big drive to win the millions. A spectacle of liberal confusion and every-man-for-himself, as the Russian writer B. Levin has it, calculated to speak to the heart of the confusion-loving, self-seeking British peasant or decadent aristocrat. Though the recently recruited mobs of long-haired anarchists may dwindle away, the more serious enemy of society cannot fail to be drawn to figures like seventeen-years-old Erotic Blubbock, or crazy tearaway guitarist Pitti Russel, or Welsh counter-tenor Emily Howzat, not to mention the tweed and tartan-dressed trans- vestites from the tundra of Scotland. And with former Minister of Religion, Lord Bumunder, scheming behind the scenes to form an alliance with that other haven of militant malcontents, the Episcopal Christian Church, a violent return to the untram- melled Liberalism of the nineteenth century could be nearer than Premier Wilson and his smug henchmen in their wildest night- mares believe.
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